The hunt for the ideal dashboard forces you to reckon with a lot of criteria, such as which platform(s) you need it for, what features make sense, and whether the app is still under active development. In hopes of sending my fellow searchers off in the right direction, I figured it was time to list as many dashboard apps here as possible.
Would you please reply below by naming the ones I've missed, indicating how I should populate empty cells (even add missing columns, if I overlooked a vital distinguishing feature)? THANKS! I'll update the list accordingly within 48 hours.
Thanks for the tag! If anyone has questions about SharpTools, I'm happy to help.
As to why people choose SharpTools, a few of the more common things we hear are:
It's easy to started with and they love discovering all the unique features that they can 'grow into' as they continue to refine their dashboards. (Custom Tiles, Super Tiles, Themes, etc)
Many of our community members use multiple hubs (eg. HE + ST) and it lets them leverage the best of each hub or transition between hubs.
Fantastic support - I hate to 'toot my own horn' here, but it's something we hear a lot in testimonials.
Well Done! Such as great idea !! - it will require some chat with each team/developer to ensure you've got the details correct and fair, but overall I think this is a great initiative to help people pick out the best dashboard solution for their needs.
As for hubiVue, well I think it's the only native dashboard that connects locally, directly to your hub (not via the internet etc) that also supports more platforms than any other... for example, it is compiled to native code for iOS, Android, Windows, MacOS, Amazon Fire plus it has a specially compiled HTML web/browser version that is 100% compatible with all the other apps* (note that web is the only platform that connects via cloud due to not being able to host anything locally on the hub itself).
Why does that matter? It is fast, feels like a native app, and has beautifully rendered user experience
Being multi-platform means, you, your family and friends can use whatever mobile, tablet, desktop PC or whatever to view and control your home/hub. I don't think any other dashboard offers as many supported platforms that connect locally as well as remotely in a single app. We have both paid and free versions - so those that want something quick and easy don't have to pay anything, but those that feel like they'd want more control and customisation can be a subscriber and unlock advanced features. We have a nice little community of users at community.hubivue.com if you're stuck or confused, and right now we're 100% focussed and exclusive to the Hubitat community and not distracted by other competitor hub solutions. So come over and give us a try
But hey, we're a young, fresh and up-and-coming dashboard solution that is still building out our features - so I'm sure the others have some cool and nice features that are worth investigating too !!
Once again, great idea this topic post, and happy to help where ever we can
Several of the others on the list have local connections.
This doesn't look like a native app. From a quick glance it looks like a hybrid app maybe built with Flutter and displaying things in web views. Multiplatform is great, but I wouldn't claim it as "native" if it's using Flutter and hybrid web tech. The issue is hybrid has performance overhead and is slower on older devices.
Keep it up though. Lots of great options already available, but doesn't hurt to have more.
Yep, but none of them do that and support the range of native platforms. That was the point being made... but agree many others have local connections too.
You will think that because it is the same UI for all platforms - ie it renders buttons that click/tap and visually look modern and styled in a modern UI way. But all of the UI is rendered in a pixel-perfect native way using the underlying accelerated video hardware for each platform (where available).
I don't see any benefit for having 6 different UIs with all sorts of challenges around how they display things, being slightly different and causing user frustrations trying to figure out how you do something from iOS vs Android, vs Windows etc... overall, the mobile and tablet apps behave like normal apps on that platform. The desktop (Windows/Web/MacOS) apps have a few extra features to support their native environment - so it truly is a native app for each platform working as you'd expect them to do. If you find something that you feel isn't right, let me know and I'll see if I can tune it for the specific platform.
It is not using Web Views - it is native binary code, as in compiled to whatever the underlying platform uses to compile code - ie XCode is used to compile for iOS and MacOS, Gradle/Java is used to compile for Android, VisualStudio is used to compile for Windows etc... each line in the source is compiled into the native CPU architecture and uses the OS SDK/API for that platform - it executes as 60 fps and works as fast as native apps (ie it isn't a web page running in Javascript building DOM objects etc).
Happy to discuss this further with you on our community forum if you're interested into how it all works. It is pretty advanced and using very modern techniques in the same way that FaceBook, Google, and all the big brands do in how modern apps are made.
I think a very useful column would be some kind of status indicating the degree to which they are actively maintained. Clicking through those links showed a fair few that had been closed because they had not had activity in over a year.
I think the other distinction that would be useful is whether it’s a full dashboard replacement or a tool that enhances the built in dashboard features.
Thanks for this. HousePanel is still alive and well. The FreeWare version is still available and actively supported. I am personally using a web hosted version that is not publicly available but 95% of the features match the FreeWare version. I hope to make the web hosted version available in the future. Oh, and HP is a full featured dashboard alternative to the builtin version.
The CSS column should probably be set to yes. Although HP does the CSS for you, power users can do their own CSS if they desire.
